A giant, inflatable balloon of President Trump as a baby in a diaper will rise through the London skyline this week.
Trump is visiting the United Kingdom to meet with Queen Elizabeth II and commemorate D-Day, but London Mayor Sadiq Khan is less than happy to host the president.
Khan gave his permission to activists to fly an almost 20-foot high, more than $22,000 balloon representing Trump as an angry infant. Obviously, this is a devastating blow from which Trump will likely never recover.
Sarcasm aside, perhaps flying balloon caricatures over your opponents’ heads is not the best way to confront them. But this juvenile style of protest is becoming the norm in the anglosphere.
A couple of weeks ago, a man threw a milkshake at Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party. According to the Washington Post, the milkshake-thrower, 32-year-old Paul Crowther, offered this explanation for his decision: “It’s a right of protest against people like him. The bile and the racism he spouts out in this country is far more damaging than a bit of milkshake to his front.”
Never mind the great tragedy of wasting a good Five Guys milkshake. The trend of milkshaking, which apparently journeyed across the pond when someone chucked a beverage at Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., may be as harmless as Crowther argues. But it’s also ineffective.
Matt Gaetz got milkshaked in Pensacola pic.twitter.com/yqz3bPgjw5
— jordan (@JordanUhl) June 1, 2019
The website Vice predictably defended the trend, saying, “Combining the public humiliation of racists and one of nature’s most delicious frosty treats is pure poetry in motion.” Author Kim Kelly wrote that “milkshaking is both effective and sophisticated, robbing its target of any dignity while emphasizing the illegitimacy of their noxious views.” Throwing foodstuff at public figures has actually been around for thousands of years, though, and never during that time was it seen as “sophisticated.”
Farage and Gaetz aren’t the first politicians to be attacked by food. The Roman Emperor Vespian, around 63 A.D., was pelted by turnips. And in the early 20th century, someone threw a cabbage at President William Howard Taft. (He famously responded, “I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head.”)
Lobbing food at your opponents doesn’t delegitimize them. If the best ammo activists have against their opponents is a milkshake (or a balloon), they’re the ones who end up looking juvenile.
These tactics accomplish one thing: making one’s own side feel self-satisfied.
